BRIEFLY NOTED Kornwolf: by Tristan Egolf (Black Cat; $14). In the third novel by Egolf, who took his own life last year, a rough beast is slouching through the hills of rural Penn- sylvania, with glowing eyes, a pompa- dour, and a strong resemblance to Rich- ard Nixon. This is good news for Owen Brynmor, a reporter who has recently re- turned to his hated home town, which he recalls as a soulless place where public schooling was "a daily incentive to go on a shooting spree." He gleefully concocts a shaggy-werewolf story for the local paper, hoping to disrupt the peace, and little sus- pecting that the lycanthrope really does exist. By day, he's a mute Amish boy; by night, an avenging spirit out of German myth. Egolf's frantic novel reads as if it had been written all at once, in a white heat, and its coherence suffers accord- ingly. Still, the voice is unforgettable, at times attaining the incantatory power of Whitman's "barbaric yawp." Slipping Into Darkness, by Peter Blauner (Little, Brown; $24.95). Francis X. Loughlin is an aging police detective haunted by a twenty-year-old homi- cide involving a young female doctor. A man named Julian Vega was put away for that crime, possibly without sufficient evidence, when he was seventeen. As Blauner's novel opens, Vega has just been released from prison, on a technicality, when Loughlin is called to investigate a crime that bears an uncomfortable re- semblance to the earlier murder. Though the book sometimes takes the easy way out ( the climactic twist feels both generic and arbitrary), it is elevated by Blau- ner's surefooted characterization of Julian. Newly free, struggling to find his way, dependent on the (somewhat tenuous) kindness of strangers, he is both sympa- (L I '/t/ '. i1, I · :\\ thetic and tough; his portrait has a com- plexity that few authors could achieve. A Godly Hero, by Michael Kazin (Knopf $30). In American memory, the image of William Jennings Bryan, whom the Democrats nominated for President in 1896, 1900, and 1908, has been ob- scured by the pathetic, evolution-bashing Bible-thumper based on him in ''Inherit the Wind." And yet from the "Cross of Gold" speech, which stunned the 1896 Convention, until his death, three de- cades later, Bryan was a hero to pop- ulists, an advocate of prohibition and women's suffrage, and a truer Wilsonian than Wilson, whom he served as Sec- retary of State. In this powerful, timely reëvaluation, Kazin argues that Bry- an's faith-based liberalism reshaped the Democratic Party and made the New Deal possible. He manages to make even Bryan's attacks on evolution palat- able, writing that his real target was so- cial Darwinism (Scopes's textbook called for eliminating "feeble-mindedness" through eugenics). But Kazin refuses to redeem his subject entirely. "Bryan's pas- sion for democracy," he writes, "always cooled at the color line." The Colony, by John Tayman (Scribner; $27.50). HawaiÏs isolation from foreign illness slowly disintegrated through the nineteenth century as trading ships arrived bearing the yellow flag of disease. When leprosy cases appeared, panicked local officials designated the island of Molo- kai, some fifty miles from Honolulu, a "leprosarium," because it was naturally in- accessible, presenting a sea cliff "so sheer that wild goats tumbled from its face." The first twelve lepers were rowed to its rocky shores in January of 1866. Drawing on eight thousand pages of documents, Tayman reconstructs a fascinating history of the settlement, which officially lasted until 1969. Shortages of food, water, and shelter sent some lepers into caves pock- eted inside an extinct volcano. Tayman's multilayered account sketches in scientific details, such as the fact that later medi- cal studies proved that most of the exiles , . weren t even contagIous. 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